Infosys has identified 21 programmers or ‘supercoders’ across the company - as part of its ‘Expert Track’ programme - who will work on challenging, futuristic projects.Anirban Sen | ET Bureau | August 03, 2015, 09:44 IST

Infosys, the country’s second largest software exporter, has revamped its traditional training programme in Mysuru and started rolling out a new learning framework for entry-level employees as part of chief executive Vishal Sikka’s strategy to position the firm as different from its peers.

Amid a slowdown in India’s $146 billion IT sector, domestic players are under pressure to innovate as top outsourcing customers such as General Electric and Citigroup are looking to clamp down on budgets and ask for fewer people on backoffice software projects.

Infosys has also identified 21 talented programmers or ‘supercoders’ across the company - as part of its ‘Expert Track’ programme - who will work on challenging, futuristic customer projects, according to Infosys’s head of talent and technology operations, Binod Hampapur Rangadore.

Infosys, which is currently training about 5,500 entry-level engineers on its new Infosys learning platform (ILP), has introduced several changes to its traditional training programme in Mysuru, including increasing the training duration, to make employees adept in areas such as design thinking and artificial intelligence.

“ILP is all about making things a little more interesting, a little more comprehensive and a little more hands-on for trainees,” said Rangadore, executive vice-president and global head of talent and technology operations at Infosys, in an interview with ET. “So ILP is all about creating the content in such a way that there is a class, there is a practice session they have to play with and then there is a quiz and there is an assessment, interspersed between teaching.”

ILP was launched in April, with its first pilot in May. The platform went live in the middle of June. Infosys has included two important changes to the training programme — every entry-level engineer has to go through a two-day immersive training session on design thinking. And every employee now is also being trained on a data visualization tool called Tableau. So far Infosys has trained over 40,000 employees in design thinking, with plans to train several thousands more. “We increased the amount of training in certain areas and added design thinking and Tableau — we added two weeks to that. It used to finish in 17 weeks earlier, now it finishes in 19 weeks. The fastest person will complete training in 19 weeks and the slowest will probably finish in 24-25 weeks,” said Rangadore.

ET had reported in March that Infosys is undertaking the largest-ever overhaul of its training programme in Mysore - the plush, Greek-styled campus that turns thousands of fresh engineering graduates into coders every year --and from June, all training at Infosys for entry-level programmers would be imparted on a new training framework, as part of a new strategy spearheaded by Sikka.

ET had also reported in March that Infosys was putting together a crack team of code writers to break tough programming and software challenges for its top clients and that these ace programmers, with the ability to use complex software algorithms to crack business problems, would be given top billing and incentivised based on metrics specific to them. Infosys has also developed a mobile app for Android and iOS which uses gamification and other features for programmers as long as they are in training.

Training has also been tweaked to train entry-level programmers in algorithmic thinking that can help them program in at least three different languages. “We are breaking that myth — someone who can program, can program in any language. So basically we are trying to emphasize more on algorithmic thinking. We’ve tweaked the approach at our Foundation training program, where they actually learn in 3 different languages.

They are being made to realise that three programming languages are not different from each other. So we’re introducing that at the entry level,” said Rangadore.

Infosys is also introducing a new concept called ‘Zero Bench’, which will give programmers across the company opportunities to work on different projects.

“What we're trying to say that if there is a piece of work that one needs to do, we'll put it up on our portal, people can look at it and do it. So today, if a .NET person wants to write a piece of code in Java, nobody is preventing him from learning. He can learn and do it. Earlier those opportunities were less now we've created those opportunities for people, " said Rangadore.

The top programmers in the training programme will be able to work from locations of their choice and at higher salaries.